as you may or may not know, we’ve been working on a new release of Interop Tools called 2.0 since the last release candidate. Interop Tools 2.0 is meant to be a new major release and not a beta of Interop Tools. But we wanted you to have an early look at what’s in Store for IT(S).

You can get extensions for ITS from the link above as well, this release requires extensions, if you came from the Interop Tools application, please follow above’s link to get extensions.

First let’s start with what this release is supposed to have at the end:

App extensibility (will allow third party devs to use Interop Tools APIs to get access to the registry for example if the users allows it via a permission system.

Provider extensions, developers will be able to write their own providers as extensions for Interop Tools.

Easier installation and management of updates.

Blur (because why not).

A release on the Store.

Project Rome support for easier remote access.

File browser support

A better tweaks section

Lumia x50 unlock process

And some other stuff I can’t reveal yet

Currently implemented features in this preview of Interop Tools 2.0 are:

Registry Provider extensions

Power state Provider extensions

Blur

Store release

As you can probably deduce we’re still far away from the end goal but we need enough feedback early to get it right. Which is why we’re releasing the first preview of ITS on the Store today.

A note on this particular release about Crash reporting

This release of Interop Tools contains support for Hockey App which provides automatic crash reporting to help fix issues quickly in the app. Hockey App doesn’t collect any personal data about your device and yourself apart from the OS version, device name and that’s pretty much it; The rest is only stacktrace and crash report related stuff. As I wanted to give you a new build of Interop Tools as quickly as possible, this release doesn’t contain a toggle to turn off the crash reporting mechanism. If you wish to remain private with this release, which I fully understand, you can always put your device in airplane mode so the app won’t send any crash reporting data.

How does ITS work in reality?

Interop Tools S actually works through a new feature called Provider extensions. Providers starting with Interop Tools 2.0 will be available as separate app extensions on xda developers. Why did we go with this? Providers are a thing in Interop Tools I barely ever update. Most update work is on the main app Core and Shell. Plus extensions is something I wanted to do for a while to allow other developers to extend the app themselves without having to contact me or writing a new app. This allows two major things:

Better update management through the Store.

Better installation management through the Store.

No more painful instructions in order to install the app successfully and no more outdated apps. Interop Tools will just require you to sideload providers in order to work on the device you’re currently using. Without providers Interop Tools can still be functional with the remote provider, allowing you to remotely connect to another device.

An early preview on the Store

We can’t wait to hear your feedback about this release, this will help us fix bugs and add new features to Interop Tools. You can give us your feedback easily through the feedback hub.
The app is currently available to all Windows 10 platforms starting today.

Have fun with that new build of Interop Tools as well, it’s been a while but I’m still a bit busy IRL and this took time to fully implement reg providers successfully.